n our illumined age, God
teacheth that conflicts and disputes are not allowable, not even with
Satan himself.

Gracious God! Even with such a lesson before him, how heedless is man!
Still do we see his world at war from pole to pole. There is war among the
religions; war among the nations; war among the peoples; war among the
rulers. What a welcome change would it be, if only these black clouds
would lift from off the skies of the world, so that the light of reality
could be shed abroad! If only the darksome dust of this continual fighting
and killing could settle forever, and the sweet winds of God's
loving-kindness could blow from out the well-spring of peace. Then would
this world become another world, and the earth would shine with the light
of her Lord.

If there is any hope, it is solely in the bounties of God: that His
strengthening grace will come, and the struggling and contending will
cease, and the acid bite of blood-dripping steel will be turned into the
honey-dew of friendship and probity and trust. How sweet would that day be
in the mouth, how fragrant as musk the scent thereof.

God grant that the new year will bring a promise of the new peace. May He
enable this distinguished assemblage to conclude a fair treaty and
establish a just covenant, that you may be blessed forever, across the
unborn reaches of time.

[Addressed to the readers of The Christian Commonwealth, 1 January 1913]

221: O YE WHO ARE STEADFAST IN THE COVENANT! THE ...

O ye who are steadfast in the Covenant! The pilgrim hath made mention of
each one of you, and hath asked for a separate letter addressed to each,
but this wanderer in the wilderness of God's love is withheld from
correspondence by a thousand preoccupations and concerns; and since out of
the easts and the wests of the earth there poureth a mounting flood of
letters upon him, it would be impossible to send a separate letter to each
one, wherefore this one letter is addressed to each of you, that it may,
as sealed wine, rejoice your souls and warm your hearts.

O ye steadfast loved ones! The grace of God is beating down upon mankind,
even as the rains in spring, and the rays of the manifest Light have made
this earth to be the envy of heaven. But alas, the blind are deprived of
this bounty, the heedless are closed off from it, the withered despair of
it, the faded are dying away--so that even as flooding waters, this endless
stream of grace passeth back into